Volkswagen continues to get rocked over its emissions scandal.
CBS News is reporting that institutional investors are suing the automaker in a German court for $3.57 billion in damages over the company's emissions cheating mess.
Lawyer Andreas Tilp told CBS on Tuesday that investors from 14 countries pooled together to file the lawsuit against VW. In particular, the investors involved in the suit are from the United States, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and the Netherlands. Hey, there was a never a rule that investors couldn't file a class-action lawsuit, right?
One of the plaintiffs is reportedly CalPERS, a pension fund representing government officials in California. The overwhelming complaint about the suit is that VW didn't inform the investors about its dirty, compromised diesel models in a timely manner, allowing them — and the rest of the world, for that matter — to hear about it when news of the scandal originally broke in September.
The timing of the announcement couldn't be worse, either, as it comes one day after a former employee claims he was wrongfully terminated by the company for refusing to participate in the deletion of files and overall obstruction of justice.
Daniel Donovan claims he was wrongfully fired by VW on Dec. 6, 2015 after not going along with the automaker's alleged demand to delete files, which he says the car manufacturer did for three days after the emissions report first surfaced from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last September.
Tuesday's news of the $3.57 billion lawsuit is on top of the $20 billion-plus in regulatory fines that potentially faces VW from countries whose diesel models were compromised. There are also the hundreds of class-action lawsuits that are being lined up to rock the embattled automaker, and all of this isn't even including the cost of fixing nearly 600,000 affected vehicles in the U.S. and 11 million worldwide.
In the U.S., VW has yet to come to terms with the EPA and California Air Resources Board (CARB) over a possible proposal for an emissions fix of the affected vehicles, with both the EPA and CARB rejecting their last such proposal in January.
